And a great day...heard the heartbeat with the doppler

I woke up feeling great today, and despite the fact that I had breakfast (a rare occurrence nowadays) I continued to feel good most of the day.  I took advantage of the brief reprieve and had a full lunch, with a cinnamon bun for desert, and then took MrH out for dinner to a chinese food place.  I just about always cook in my own kitchen and rarely eat out during the week (weekends are another story!) but ever since the nausea hit, I cannot eat anything that I have prepared myself.  I am simply not interested in anything that is not new or out of the ordinary.  Hence my eating out for both lunch and dinner over the past week, and likely to continue until the malaise subsides.

With my first pregnancy all I could eat was sushi for dinner.  I would have raw salmon sashimi daily, for weeks at a time.  I think whomever wrote What to expect... or any similar pregnancy do's and don'ts would have had a heart attack hearing about my diet during those times.  Oh well, at least I didn't have a glass of wine afterwards or something truly sinful.  This pregnancy I am absolutely not interested in sushi or sashimi at all, but instead am craving aspic made with pig's legs and tail (like mommy makes it... I ate three bowlfuls at New Year's) and, because I have no idea where I will find pig's ears, legs or tails here in my LittleTown, I was looking for something similar called headcheese (made from pig's combined parts and pieces of gelatinous stuff in between).  Could not find any, as Save On Foods has stopped selling it (I think I was the only customer buying it, and then I went vegan, so they took it off the menu).  So, no aspic, no headcheese, what's a girl to do?  I am pretty close to making soup and gelatinizing it with some good ol' fashion gelatin. I would have jello but I am really not into sweet things.  If anyone has tried to make the Romanian aspic (racituri) without pig parts and just used gelatin, please let me know, I am getting a bit desperate here.  Similarly, if anyone who lives in my town can tell me where to find pig's tail, ears or legs, I am all ears myself.

I wonder if I am going back to being vegan after the pregnancy.  I think probably vegetarian, if not vegan.  I am still not cooking meat in my house, but will probably continue to use eggs and milk once the pregnancy is done, and particularly so if I have a baby to feed.  People are sometimes appalled when I tell them that I plan to raise a mostly vegetarian child, but I don't see what the problem is.  I am very well read in the field and know what I am doing, and so far neither myself nor MrH have gotten into any kind of nutritional deficiencies, quite on the contrary, we are doing better than before.  It is only during this pregnancy that I started craving animal products, and although I had the firm intention to stay vegan, I just was too sick and had to take whatever I could stomach in order to avoid losing too much weight.  As it is, I am now 4 lb lighter than I was when I got pregnant.  At the same gestational age with my first, I was about 6 lb heavier, so I am behind 10 lb.  Not that I am complaining, I don't mind not gaining a lot of weight, but it does show that my appetite has really been in the boots for a long time now.

Today, after work, I asked MrH to try and listen for the baby with the hand held doppler.  I had tried two days ago and could not hear it, but today we heard it easily, loud and clear.  At only 8 weeks and 5 days, just like with the last pregnancy in fact.  So much for whomever does not believe that you can hear the heartbeat this early, it was not just a fluke the first time, it is really possible.  It was 165-179 bpm, and it sounded so...unreal!  MrH said that hearing the heartbeat made the whole thing sound more real, but for me it makes it look more and more like science-fiction.  I feel as if it cannot be happening to me again, kind of like a deja-vu.  I am very happy about it, don't get me wrong, it just feels strange.  I am also very happy that I don't depend on the ultrasound to reassure me about babyH being alive, as I have the ubiquitous handheld doppler now.  Whenever I start to think crazy thoughts, I can just whip it out and listen to the thump-thump-thump that lets me know I am still pregnant.  'cause yeah, even after all this time, I am still expecting the pregnancy to simply evaporate into thin air.  That's what I call crazy.